She pulled her attention back to Rydberg: “—and we had constant full weight once we’d spun up the hull.”
Jinann’s eyes widened. As she sat straighter, her hair passed like a flame over the sight of clouds and water. “Eyach, a spider ship? Sheer beauty, they. I’ve sought to make a brooch in the form of one, a minimotor to turn it,^nit there lacked a universe around.”
“Would you like to see ours?” Rydberg asked. Beneath his reserve, Dagny thought, he had more feel for people than he let on, or maybe than he knew. “If I’m going to show you my pictures, we can start there. It’s a standard scan, you’ve seen the same kind a hundred times. But it is … cheerful.”
“We could use some cheer, by damn,” Edmond Beynac growled. He reached to close his hand around Dagny’s.
“Hush,” she murmured aside. Not to break the fragile mood in the room. Nonetheless his concern lifted her heart. He felt the loss himself—who didn’t? —but he knew how deep it went in her.
Rydberg kept his tone dry: “A large spacecraft routinely sends a bug to observe from outside, supplementing her instruments and sensors, making sure everything is in order.”
Space did not forgive, Dagny thought. Memories trooped down the years, her dead and they who had come near dying.
Rydberg took a pocket databanker from his tunic and activated the multiceiver screen. Before them appeared what a tiny robot had recorded as it jetted about. Distance-dwindled, the hull was a teardrop amidst blackness and frost-cold stars; the four fullerene cables, each extending a kilometer from its waist, were gossamer, the pods at their ends were glints. They turned like second hands on an antique clock, measuring off time while they fell between the planets.
“Wondrous,” Jinann breathed.
Rydberg grinned a bit. “Less wondrous to live in.” He played a close view, synchronously rotating. A man climbed downward, radially outward, by rungs in the flexible airtube that lay alongside the cable. The camera followed him to its pod, which he entered. Another scene succeeded this, taken within the cramped and crowded quarters. “Here I am.” Limited facilities for hobbies existed. Rydberg in image sat at a workbench, using a variety of tools to hand-carve a length of wood. The shot focused on his design, intricately intertwining vines and leaves. “This will be a frieze for an armoire I will make on Earth.”
“Ah, for your home there?” Beynac asked.
“For the home I hope to have there.” Rydberg sighed. “I’m tired of apartments.”
Yes, Dagny thought, he hadn’t many years to go in space. If you started young in that game, you ended it half young. Never mind longevity meds, nor even the robotics that made human slowness and frailty almost
irrelevant. Beyond a certain point, no biotechnology would compensate for cumulative radiation damage. Someday an electromagnetic screen would be perfected, to fend off cosmic rays and solar wind, but meanwhile they set their limits on careers. Fifty was the usual cutoff age, to assure a normal, healthy span afterward. Already, his silvering hair—
It meant less that ‘Mond’s was wholly grizzled, while hers stayed red because she made it, not so much in vanity as in defiance. They had spent most of their lives inside the Moon, far better protected.
Her heed went back to the scene. Whoever had been shooting it, doubtless by request, drew back for a longer view. An attractive woman came up behind Rydberg, leaned over to watch what he did, laid a hand on his shoulder. “Una, that is Leota Mannion from North America, one of the engineers we were conveying,” he said a little quickly.
Dagny brightened. “Friendly sort,” she observed.
Rydberg shifted his glance. “Well, on a lengthy mission—”
A prospective wife for him? He really should start having children soon. Especially being a spaceman. Dagny wasn’t convinced that nanorepair could entirely fix mutated DNA. Not that she and ‘Mond hadn’t been getting grandchildren and didn’t expect more— from Brandir and his two wives, Verdea and the Zarenn (once Jiang Xi) she’d wedded in an eerie ceremony, Kaino in his communal arrangement (though there you needed genetic analysis to be certain who’d fathered whom, and the members didn’t seem to care), Temerir and his colleague Hylia (once Olga Vuolainen), maybe Fia and Jinann in future..,. But Lars was the Earth human.